Thad Williamson Guest Editor a, Craig Borowiak b, Mark J. Kaswan c, J. S. Maloy d, Gar Alperovitz e, Steve Dubb e & Erik Olin Wright

Transcription

1 This article was downloaded by: [University of Wisconsin - Madison], [Erik Olin Wright] On: 24 January 2013, At: 08:28 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK New Political Science Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory: A Symposium on Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias Thad Williamson Guest Editor a, Craig Borowiak b, Mark J. Kaswan c, J. S. Maloy d, Gar Alperovitz e, Steve Dubb e & Erik Olin Wright f a University of Richmond, USA b Haverford College, USA c University of Texas at Brownsville, USA d Oklahoma State University, USA e University of Maryland, USA f University of Wisconsin, USA To cite this article: Thad Williamson Guest Editor, Craig Borowiak, Mark J. Kaswan, J. S. Maloy, Gar Alperovitz, Steve Dubb & Erik Olin Wright (2012): Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory: A Symposium on Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias, New Political Science, 34:3, e358-e404 To link to this article: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

2 New Political Science, Volume 34, Number 3, September 2012 Symposium Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory: A Symposium on Erik Olin Wright s Envisioning Real Utopias Thad Williamson, Guest Editor Contributors: Craig Borowiak Haverford College, USA Mark J. Kaswan University of Texas at Brownsville, USA J. S. Maloy Oklahoma State University, USA Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb University of Maryland, USA Thad Williamson University of Richmond, USA Erik Olin Wright University of Wisconsin, USA Introduction Thad Williamson University of Richmond, USA Politics is frequently described as the art of the possible, but political science often takes the form of trying to understand, categorize, and explain what exists. Even work in our discipline that is explicitly motivated by concerns with deep democracy and egalitarian social justice customarily takes the form of critique. Implicit in such critiques, however, is the idea that alternative social, political, and economic arrangements are desirable, feasible, and achievable. This implicit claim that another world is possible requires further scrutiny, especially in The collapse of actually existing socialism in Europe twenty years ago cast serious doubt on the idea that there could ever be a systemic alternative to capitalism. Yet in a different way, the decay of a strong social democratic politics in the US, as well as the severe limitations of the Obama presidency, have also cast doubt on the notion that New Deal-type liberal reforms are feasible and achievable in the US. Both the conventional radical and the conventional liberal alternative to the status quo seem very far from the politics of our time. ISSN print/issn on-line/12/ q 2012 Caucus for a New Political Science

3 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 359 Erik Olin Wright s book Envisioning Real Utopias 1 combines social theory with copious examples of real world alternatives to make a major contribution to contemporary social and political thought. Wright, president of the American Sociological Association for 2012, has been thinking actively about the practical possibilities for radical change within contemporary capitalist societies since at least the early 1990s, when he launched the Real Utopias project at the University of Wisconsin. That project has produced half a dozen edited volumes (published by Verso) covering topics such as market socialism, participatory democracy, and gender equality, with contributions from numerous prominent political theorists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Envisioning Real Utopias goes a step further, by combining in one volume a critique of capitalism, a theoretical account of social-ism, an identification of desirable and feasible alternatives with egalitarian substance in both the political and economic realm, and a theory of pathways towards radical change. In perhaps the book s most critical theoretical point, Wright draws a sharp distinction between statism and socialism, and argues that a desirable alternative to capitalism must be one in which both political and economic power are subordinate to what he terms social power. In an effort to draw attention to and establish a dialogue with this important work, the New Political Science caucus sponsored a roundtable on Wright s book at the annual APSA meetings in Seattle in September 2011, including four of the contributors to this symposium as well as Wright himself. This symposium consists of revised versions of essays by Craig Borowiak, Mark Kaswan, Jason Maloy, and Thad Williamson, as well as an additional essay by Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb, followed by a response from Erik Olin Wright. Taken as a whole, this symposium explores in depth many critical issues involved in forging a new form of radical politics that challenges contemporary capitalism rather than accommodates itself to it. It is also intended to serve as an invitation for political scientists to join in the project of what Wright terms emancipatory social science. Scaling up Utopias: E.O. Wright and the Search for Economic Alternatives Craig Borowiak Haverford College, USA Crisis has a way of opening new horizons. Such is the case with the current world economic crisis. Out of the tumult of economic hardship and insecurity, a great need for economic alternatives has been illuminated. It is, however, one thing to recognize such a need and quite another to have a vision of how concrete alternatives might be realized. Conceiving alternatives is particularly challenging in the current era, following two decades of neoliberal triumphalism in which capitalist economies have been treated as inviolable, and non-capitalist economic forms have been routinely dismissed as both undesirable and unviable. In this 1 Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010).

4 360 Thad Williamson et al. context, Erik Olin Wright s book Envisioning Real Utopias 2 makes a refreshing and timely intervention. Encyclopedic in scope and crisply analytical, the book charts the problems with both the present and new pathways for economic transformation. It calls forth both utopian aspirations and realist sensibilities, refusing in the process to concede the terms of the struggle to the cynicism of the neoliberal worldview. It is a magisterial book, chock full of insight and pregnant with provocative examples. In this essay, I critically engage Wright s book. I draw attention to some of the book s many strengths. I also develop three lines of critique. The first has to do with the way Wright analyzes alternatives in isolation from one another, while neglecting the connections among them. The second has to do with Wright s strong emphasis upon deliberate strategy and how this occludes the vital role that serendipity, creativity, and unscripted solidarities play in transformative social movements. The third has to do with Wright s understanding of scale and what I read against the grain of his optimistic embrace of utopia to be an underlying pessimism about the present prospects for systemic transformation. I illustrate these critiques with brief examples from the transnational movement for a social and solidarity economy. Opening the Horizon, Envisioning Alternatives As Wright himself describes, Envisioning Real Utopias (along with his real utopias project more broadly) originated as a response to the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the apparent disarray among the post-soviet Left. The collapse of centralized economies had left something of a void when it came to envisioning emancipatory political economies: Once communism was removed from the picture, it was not clear what alternatives to capitalism remained. As a result, the global political economy has become dominated by conservative utopias in which capitalist economies are cast as the best of all possible economies while alternatives to the status quo are construed as utopian fantasies. Progressive social theory has, in effect, ceded this ideological ground by shifting attention from class struggle to identity politics and disparate local struggles for recognition. Envisioning Real Utopias seeks to rectify this with an emancipatory social science that aspires for systemic change while remaining firmly attuned to practical possibility. An emancipatory social science, Wright tells us, must perform three essential tasks. It must: (1) diagnose and critique the status quo; (2) identify alternatives; and (3) elaborate strategies for scaling alternatives up in order to bring about systemic transformation. All three are necessary, he argues, if we are to generate economic alternatives that are not only desirable in the abstract, but also viable and achievable. 3 With regard to the first task, Wright provides a stylized overview of eleven basic critiques of capitalism. These range from the proposition that capitalism perpetuates eliminable deficits in individual freedom to the propositions that capitalism corrodes community and destroys the environment. Guided by a normative commitment to what he calls radical democratic egalitarianism, Wright s presentation of these critiques is exceptionally nuanced, lucid, and compelling. With them, he does not purport to offer a unified theory. He does wish to identify the 2 Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias. 3 Ibid., 10.

5 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 361 many problems that result when capitalist structures are allowed to dominate other economic forms. The overarching message is that capitalism, despite its potential for social benefit, undermines social and political justice and restricts broader efforts at greater emancipation. Thus the need for alternatives is clear. Wright s exploration of alternatives in Part 2 of the book is, for my purposes, the most original and provocative section of the book. Distinguishing between state power, economic power, and social power, as well as between statist, capitalist, and socialist structures, he diagrams multiple pathways to social empowerment. He differentiates these pathways according to how the three types of power interact to affect the allocation of economic resources. For example, statist socialism, social capitalism, and social economy can be differentiated according to whether civil society influences the exercise of state power, the exercise of economic power, or the direct organization of economic activity, respectively. Here, Wright s distinction between statist and socialist economic structures is particularly important because it enables him to distance his project from state-led communist projects and the paralyzing disillusionment they engendered among leftist critics. By socialist he does not mean state socialism but rather economic structures that reflect the influence of the social power expressed through civil society. As he puts it, he wishes to take the social in socialism seriously. 4 These categories and diagrams are particularly useful in that they challenge binary Cold War logics that construe capitalism and socialism as fundamentally incompatible. Such logics have fueled neoliberal discourse and have weighed down progressive social imagination. Pushing away from such purist paradigms, Wright argues that existing economies should be seen as amalgams of different structures: They are hybrid. In the US economy, for example, the state has considerable influence over the allocation of resources and over regulation of economic activity. The allocation of resources also has a socialist character to the extent that civil society influences the economic decisions of both business and government. The same could be said of other economies the world over, albeit with different compositions among the three types of economic structure. Once we break our attachment to purist models, it becomes possible to identify economic practices and institutions that challenge capitalism in some respects even if they remain imbricated with capitalist circuits of power in others. Wright gives numerous examples of hybrid practices that enhance the scope and penetration of social power in economic life. These include: the innovations in the social economy carried out by Le Chantier de l Économie Social et Solidaire in Quebec, Canada; Wikipedia and the open-source movement; arguments for and experiments with an unconditional basic income; labor-controlled solidarity funds (Quebec); share-levy wage-earner funds (Sweden); worker-owned cooperatives; employee stock ownership programs (ESOPs); the nested cooperatives of the Mondragón Corporation in Basque, Spain; proposals for market socialism; and arguments for participatory economics (parecon), to name just a few. In one way or another, these innovations defy the pure capitalist form. They do so despite being tied to the capitalist economy in other respects. With his examples and notion of hybridity, Wright helps to diversify the discursive frame 4 Ibid., 110.

6 362 Thad Williamson et al. from which alternatives might be identified. In so doing, his project resonates strongly with the diverse economies perspective pioneered by post-structural feminist geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham, as well as with the efforts of Boaventura de Sousa Santos to theorize counter-hegemonic political economies. 5 It is curious that Wright does not engage these and related projects more directly, especially given that they use many of the same examples and similarly seek to expand our thinking about non-capitalist alternatives. Nevertheless, Wright s examples are thought-provoking and give life to his theoretical framework. I now turn my attention to some of the book s more serious shortcomings. Beyond the Smorgasbord: Finding Connections among Alternatives In his discussion of alternatives, Wright provides a diverse menu of possibilities for social empowerment. He tends, however, to treat the alternatives in isolation from one another. He presents a smorgasbord of economic alternatives with little indication of the connections that exist among them. Many of these and similar initiatives have evolved together. Wright also draws scant attention to alternatives whose primary contributions are to bridge other initiatives. He, for example, discusses the Quebec social economy, but does not mention the existence of a global social and solidarity economy network, in which Quebec is but one node. Many of the ideas percolating through the Quebec social economy emerged out of this network and through facilitated encounters with organizations in Latin America, Europe, and francophone Africa. Formalized in 2001 with the creation of RIPESS, the Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of the Social and Solidarity Economy, this network is both a product of synergies among diverse economic initiatives and a bridging organization that facilitates new collaborations. Take, for instance, ESSGlobal, 6 a global initiative sponsored by RIPESS to map the social and solidarity economy. Over several years, groups in various countries (especially Brazil, Canada, Italy, and Spain) had been independently mapping social and solidarity economy organizations in their respective regions. With the support of RIPESS, they are now collaborating on a global mapping project that will draw local data into a shared world map without overriding the operational parameters of local maps. Such mapping networks not only build connections among economic alternatives, they are also alternatives themselves. They are generating new awareness, new social networks, new supply chains, and new cooperative connections among consumers and producers that depart from the capitalist paradigm. To be sure, Wright sees the value of interactions and synergies. He regards such synergies as necessary for real progress. Nonetheless, he approaches such interactions and synergies more as potentialities than as realities. He, in fact, seems to use the ostensible absence of such synergies to shore up his own theorizing: The prospects for such synergies, however, depend upon the possibilities for transformative struggles. And to understand those possibilities, we need a theory of 5 See J.K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.), Another Production is Possible. Beyond the Capitalist Canon (New York: Verso, 2006). 6,

7 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 363 transformation. 7 While he may not have intended it this way, Wright s language makes it sound like cooperation among diverse economic practices on the ground only becomes possible through the work of social-political theorizing. The successful networking of wildly diverse organizations within the solidarity economy movement suggests that practices on the ground may have actually outrun Wright on this point. Strategy and Serendipity One thing that sets Wright apart from others who theorize alternative economic activity is his orientation to the system level. Wright does not merely target capitalocentrism; he targets the larger structures of domination that inhibit social and political justice. For him, the challenge is to imagine and bring about an economy in which statist and capitalist structures are subordinate to the democratic authority of society, rather than the other way around. This brings me to the issue of transformative strategy, the subject matter of the third and final part of the book. Wright insists upon the need for strategy. If alternatives are to be achievable and not just desirable and viable, he argues, they depend upon consciously pursued strategies to counteract capitalist domination. 8 Strategy matters, he writes, because emancipatory alternatives are very unlikely to just happen. They can only come about, he continues, because people work to implement them, and are able to overcome obstacles and forms of opposition. 9 On its face, this seems right. Alternative practices generally do not just happen. They involve actors making conscious decisions. At the same time, however, new transformative ideas and practices often do develop in unexpected ways along unplanned trajectories without being part of a larger strategy. New economic practices often emerge, not out of strategy but out of serendipity. Furthermore, even when alternative economic initiatives do reflect broader strategies of transformation, different participants often have very different (at times conflicting) motivations and strategic visions. Wright s emphasis upon common strategy and deliberate action overshadows the way any far-reaching transformation would entail a mishmash of peoples, agendas, coalitions, conflicts, and strategies. It also understates the possibility indeed, importance for social movements of creativity and receptivity to things, perspectives, and actions that are new and unexpected. As Arendt observed, revolution and novelty are intertwined. 10 Collective public action harbors the potential for novelty for new beginnings, for natality that exceeds our capacity to strategize. This is not to suggest that strategy is not necessary for the sort of transformations Wright has in mind. It is, however, to suggest that any such transformation will require social mobilizations that draw vibrancy from the eruption of new ideas, relationships, and ways of thinking. To give one example, also from the social and solidarity economy movement, in October 2011, an international forum (FIESS) on the social and solidarity economy was held in Montreal, Canada. This forum happened to coincide with the launching of Occupy Montreal, the occupation of a public square a few blocks away by 7 Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, p Ibid., Ibid., Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, Revised Edition, 1965).

8 364 Thad Williamson et al. activists acting in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement begun weeks earlier in New York. The coincidence of these events was unscripted. It became, however, an occasion for movement building. Seizing on the opportunity, several forum participants organized impromptu rallies and educational exchanges between the two venues. For many forum participants, these offered their first direct exposure to the occupy movement, with its unique tactics and interesting mix of local and translocal grievances. It was also a reminder of the importance of contentious politics for meaningful economic transformation. For many occupiers, the exchange provided new ideas for how protest might be channeled into concrete alternative economic practices. The new strategizing that took place in this setting was made possible by developments that were not themselves strategized. More generally, encounters such as these, whether they take place at a forum or by happenstance, are often what spark social imagination, as problems, agendas, technologies, and theories are juxtaposed in new ways. Although Wright s framework may not altogether foreclose a role for contingency and novelty within transformative political projects, it also does not expressly allow for such a role. For all the creativity reflected in Wright s book, the creative process of movement making is left largely untheorized. This is an important occlusion, not least because openness to new practices, relationships, strategic directions, and worldviews is a hallmark of many alternative economy initiatives, not merely as a means to a larger strategic end, but as an indispensible feature of an emancipatory political economy. Capitalist Hegemony and Emancipation Deferred Having insisted upon the need for strategy in general, Wright outlines three types of strategy: ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic, roughly corresponding to revolution, anarchism, and social democracy, respectively. What stands out about Wright s account of strategy is not only his optimistic desire for pathways of transformation, but also and more striking given the book s utopian aspirations his gloomy outlook on the present. Like many other contemporary social theorists, he is deeply skeptical about the plausibility of revolutionary (that is, ruptural) transformation in the current age. More surprising is how little confidence he has in the other two types of strategy. He doubts that interstitial initiatives working outside of both the state and capitalist industry can alone erode the basic structural power of capital sufficiently to dissolve capitalist limits on emancipatory social change. He is similarly skeptical about symbiotic initiatives that seek transformation by directly engaging the state these are too easily co-opted in ways that consolidate rather than challenge capitalist domination. We can interpret this skepticism as a mark of Wright s realism. It is a realism that becomes especially manifest when Wright unequivocally declares that capitalism is so secure and flexible that no strategy seriously threatens it. 11 This is a startling concession, if only because of the optimism that otherwise pervades the text. In the end, the real utopias project entails a deferral: systemic transformation will have to wait for another time. For Wright, this need not entail quiet acceptance. There are things we can do now in the hope of 11 Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, pp. 327, 364.

9 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 365 opening possibilities for the future. 12 The best bet, according to Wright, is to use interstitial and symbiotic strategies in tandem with the hope of opening possibilities for the future. 13 It is a deferral nonetheless. This prioritization of systemic transformation a prioritization that is in other respects one of the book s greatest strengths comes at a certain cost. As Gibson- Graham have argued in response to their own critics, the imperative to scale up alternatives exercises its own hegemony over emancipatory social imagination by denying the value of projects that undertake less systemic agendas and operate at lower levels. 14 There are hints of such a dynamic in Part 3 of Wright s work. There, he acknowledges that many of the actors in alternative economic initiatives see themselves as taking part in strategies for social change, but he nevertheless discounts these actors and strategies once they are held up to the standards of systemic transformation. 15 The problem is not that there are no strategies, it is rather that the strategies are improperly scaled. What is at issue is not the mere capacity to expand the scale of economic alternatives we know this is possible, as evidenced by the rapid expansion of the aforementioned social and solidarity economy movement but rather the capacity to scale them up sufficiently to fundamentally transform the system as a whole. 16 This sets an incredibly high bar. Fixating upon such a grand agenda can lead to the very sort of disillusionment that Wright himself decries. Systemic transformation may be desirable, but it is not the only measure of social change. The emancipatory effects of economic alternatives can be identified on lower levels without having to wait for a revolutionary moment to arrive or until a coherent and compelling strategy for system-wide transformation has been formulated. New economic forms and subjectivities can be affirmed here and now, in any place or context, 17 not merely because they may lead to structural transformation in the future but because they embody, in themselves, real projects of social emancipation in the present. Envisioning Real Utopias is one of the most comprehensive and inspiring works of social theory to come out in recent years. It clarifies the capitalist condition. It opens new conceptual space to acknowledge and encourage individual economic alternatives in our midst. And it aims to channel economic experimentation into a broader emancipatory agenda. Above all else, the book is an invitation for further action, research, and thinking about alternatives. This essay and its critiques are intended as a response to this invitation. Envisioning a post-capitalist era poses some real challenges, not least of which are the need for responsiveness to new ideas, an ability to recognize and create connections among initiatives, and sensitivity to the multiple levels at which emancipation can occur. On these points, I expect Wright would fully agree. 12 Ibid., Ibid., J.K. Gibson-Graham, Beyond Global vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame, in Andrew Herod and Melissa Wright (eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, p Ibid., Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, p. xxxvi.

10 366 Thad Williamson et al. Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Interstitial Transformation and the Cooperative Movement Mark J. Kaswan University of Texas at Brownsville, USA Nearly a billion people worldwide are members of cooperatives, according to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), the apex organization for cooperative associations worldwide. 18 According to the UN, which designated 2012 as the International Year of the Cooperative, fully half the world s population is affected in some way by cooperatives. 19 In the US, about thirty thousand cooperatives hold over three trillion dollars in total assets, generate over six hundred and fifty billion dollars in revenue, some seventy-five billion dollars in wages and benefits, and account for about two million jobs. 20 So if, as Erik Olin Wright suggests in Envisioning Real Utopias, 21 his most recent contribution to an impressive collection of work, one considers cooperatives to be a part of an interstitial strategy for social transformation, the space they already occupy would appear to be quite large indeed. Wright clearly recognizes the importance of cooperatives in his project for social transformation. He argues that, as participatory democratic forms of organization, cooperatives play...a central role in social economy activities [by affirming] the emancipatory values of egalitarianism. 22 Worker and consumer cooperatives are listed first among a set of candidates for elements of an interstitial strategy of social emancipation, as a way to build alternative institutions and foster new forms of social relations, 23 and he notes their value in helping to promote social transformation in any transitional period. 24 There are problems with Wright s approach, however, as his nearly exclusive focus on worker s cooperatives leaves out the vast majority of the existing cooperative movement and isolates what remains from its ideological framework. Wright s analysis fails to capture the diversity of the cooperative movement, and so fails to recognize not only some of its strengths, but also some of its weaknesses and potential pitfalls. Because his discussion of cooperatives is limited, my first task is to fill in some of the missing detail. The Modern Cooperative Movement In 1995, the ICA adopted a revised set of Cooperative Principles as part of a Statement of Cooperative Identity. 25 The statement reflects, if not always the 18 Founded in 1895, the ICA is one of the only working-class based organizations to have survived both world wars and the Cold War, and was one of only three organizations given special reporter status by the United Nations (UN) at its founding. 19 International Cooperative Alliance, Statistical Information on the Co-operative Movement,, 20 Steven Deller, Ann Hoyt, Brett Hueth, and Reka Sundaram-Stukel, Research on the Economic Impact of Cooperatives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, 2009). 21 Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias. 22 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., ICA, Statement on the Co-operative Identity,, principles.html.. The committee that drafted the revised principles also published a

11 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 367 reality, at least the aspirations of the cooperative movement. It defines the cooperative as an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise. Stated values include self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. 26 An accompanying white paper asserts that the principles reflect a fundamental respect for all human beings and a belief in their capacity to improve themselves economically and socially through mutual self-help, and that the success of the cooperative movement shows that democratic procedures applied to economic activities are feasible, desirable, and efficient and that democratically-controlled economic organisations make a contribution to the common good. 27 The principles themselves include voluntary membership, democratic governance on a one-person one-vote basis, common ownership, and limits on both capital accumulation and the role of outside capital. Additional principles call for cooperatives to engage in educational activities, especially regarding the cooperative principles themselves, as well as cooperation among cooperatives and sustainable development practices. 28 Two features of the cooperative movement stand out: Its size and its diversity. The ICA bills itself as the world s largest non-governmental organization, 29 with 233 member organizations representing close to a billion people in over one hundred countries worldwide. All of the world s leading economies have vibrant cooperative sectors. For example, one out of every three families in Japan is a member of a cooperative, while in Singapore cooperatives claim 50% of the population as members. In Quebec, 70% of the population is a member of at least one cooperative. 30 They are also important parts of the economies of many developing nations, for example in Kenya where they account for 45% of the economy. 31 Cooperatives have also attained substantial diversity of form. Almost any kind of business can be organized as a cooperative, but the most significant differentiation is based on the particular stakeholder group that constitutes its owner/members: Consumer cooperatives, including credit unions and retail stores, are owned by those who purchase the goods or use the services of the cooperative; producer cooperatives, which are typically primarily engaged in distribution and marketing, are owned by people or enterprises producing similar goods, and are especially common in agriculture and artisan communities; and worker cooperatives, owned and governed by the people who carry out the functions of the enterprise that is, the workers. 32 The principles are implemented Footnote 25 continued white paper, which provides much in the way of history, detail, and explanation. Ian MacPherson, Co-operative Principles for the 21st Century (Geneva: International Co-operative Alliance, 1995). First adopted at its founding in 1895, this was the third major revision. 26 MacPherson, Co-operative Principles, p Ibid., Ibid., ICA, Introduction to ICA,, 30 ICA, Statistical Information. 31 Report of the United Nations Secretary-General, Cooperatives in Social Development (No. A/64/132) (New York: United Nations General Assembly, 2009). 32 There are several different typologies; see, for example, Johnston Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1997); National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), About Cooperatives,,

12 368 Thad Williamson et al. differently in each of these, and some of these differences are quite significant in terms of the kind of social transformation Wright is interested in. Post-Marxists like Wright often favor worker cooperatives because they most directly address the problem of the subordination of labor to capital. However, in economic terms, they have had the least success in the developed economies. They are uncommon in comparison to the other types, and are generally fairly small enterprises with no more than a few dozen members. Wright s exemplar, Mondragón, with eighty-five thousand employees, is a significant departure from the norm. 33 As will be seen below, there are further reasons for not putting all the transformative eggs in this basket. Consumer cooperatives are in many ways the face of the cooperative movement. As retail stores, credit unions, and utilities they may be the most recognizable, but they are also unquestionably the largest in terms of the number of members. They account for 92% of all US cooperatives and over 98% of all co-op memberships. 34 Their diversity is significant: They range from small buying clubs to REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.), one of the world s largest cooperatives with some four million members. While consumer cooperatives may predominate, producer cooperatives are significant for their dominance in particular markets. Some of these, including Sunkist, Ocean Spray, and Land O Lakes are very large companies, although most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that they are co-ops. About 30% of all agricultural produce in the US is handled by cooperatives, including some 90% of all dairy. 35 Like the agricultural cooperatives, craft and artisan cooperatives are associations of independent producers whose primary reason for coming together is the marketing and distribution of their goods. 36 Cooperatives and Social Transformation Despite this diversity, Wright focuses almost exclusively on worker cooperatives. Consumer cooperatives are mentioned on occasion without elaboration, and he seems to admit that they may be part of a strategy of interstitial transformation, 37 but they are never described or discussed. He acknowledges the diversity of form (in a footnote), but asserts that while the other types may embody some principles of social empowerment,...they do not pose as sharp a contrast and perhaps Footnote 32 continued org/abcoop.cfm.; and UN Secretary-General, Cooperatives in Social Development. For the purposes of this article I have chosen to limit my discussion to just these three types, as they are the simplest, most direct, and most representative. 33 In terms of membership, Mondragón alone has more members than all the worker cooperatives in the US combined. Deller et al., Research, p Ibid. 35 NCBA, About Cooperatives. 36 There may be some confusion over the use of the term producer here, but the point is that it is a cooperative of independent producers for the purpose of marketing and distribution, not for production. Wright himself conflates the terms at times, for example where worker-owned cooperatives and producer cooperatives appear in the same sentence in a way that seems to indicate that he believes they are the same thing: Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, p For example, ibid., 330.

13 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 369 challenge to capitalism as worker-owned cooperatives. 38 It would have been helpful if Wright had provided an argument to support his claim, because in dismissing consumer and producer cooperatives as, in effect, insufficiently radical, he dismisses the vast majority of what stands as the world s largest existing, organized alternative to liberal capitalism. This is, I think, a serious mistake. Wright s orientation may be understandable given his long history of work centered on class analysis. This perspective is not foregrounded in Real Utopias as it is in some of his other work, but the focus on worker cooperatives suggests that it is still operating in the background. From a theoretical perspective, however, there are few things about a worker cooperative that will necessarily make it transformative. Workers may be unlikely to outsource their own jobs, and are at least somewhat more likely to function in a more sustainable fashion. But there is no getting away from the fact that the cooperative is the private property of its owners, and nothing prevents them from engaging in self-interested behavior in their collective interest at the expense of the larger community. The fact that worker cooperatives tend to operate in a more socially responsible manner is not necessarily a function of their ownership or governance structure. Rather, it could simply be that the people who are most likely to form or join them are more likely to already hold progressive values or become acculturated to them by others in the company. Finally, breaking down the institutional separation between members of the cooperative and the broader society, one of Wright s objectives, requires a kind of openness that is impossible in a worker s cooperative. No matter how progressive they may be, worker cooperatives are necessarily exclusive. They simply cannot meet the requirement of the principles for open membership because they can only have so many workers. While absent in most worker cooperatives, however, this inclusivity is an important characteristic of consumer cooperatives. 39 Advocates of consumer cooperatives have argued that worker cooperatives are still capitalistic as they produce goods for profit (even though all profit is for the benefit of the workers and not outside investors), whereas consumer cooperatives are more socially oriented, because there is no profit in the traditional sense, only excess revenue to be returned to the consumers themselves. 40 Workers may be expected to limit their demands because they are consumers within the same system; similarly the cooperative is constrained from exploiting the workers because the workers are also part of the community. In effect, the choice is between the idea of manufacture organised by groups of producers, for exchange with the 38 Ibid., The principle of open membership articulated by the ICA does leave room for some exclusion, to the extent that members must accept the responsibilities of membership. Even consumer cooperatives may place limits on membership by requiring, for example, that members live within a certain area. Acceptance of the cooperative principles is also generally accepted as a requirement of membership, which may serve to exclude some people. 40 Beatrice Potter Webb and Sidney Webb, The Consumers Co-operative Movement (London and New York: Longman s, Green, 1921), pp A related question has to do with whether or not consumer cooperatives should serve non-members. While allowing that it may be a way of drawing in new members, Lambert argues that if most of a cooperative s business came from non-members, it would cease to be genuine. Paul Lambert, Studies in the Social Philosophy of Co-operation, trans. J. Létargez (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1963), pp

14 370 Thad Williamson et al. rest of the world [as opposed to] manufacture organised by the whole democracy of consumers, for their consumption or service [and] therefore for use. 41 Labor is still alienated in a consumer-oriented system, although under completely different conditions from traditional capitalism. Someone who works in a community based enterprise is more likely to understand that they are a part of something larger than themselves, that they are not simply being exploited to produce surplus value for the enrichment of a small class of investors. Ultimately, where all consumers are organized into vertically integrated cooperatives, the alienation of labor would be overcome because the workers would, in effect, exchange with one another through the distributive mechanism of the cooperative system. All surplus, then, would be returned to the workers, albeit not in their role as workers but in their role as consumers. Starved of profit, capitalist enterprise would then collapse. 42 Some aspects of consumer cooperatives limit their revolutionary potential. The most important is the patronage refund itself, because, so long as it is the primary motivation for membership, it reinforces individualistic, as opposed to social, attitudes. It also provides greater rewards for those who spend the most. While this is clearly an advance over one person accumulating profits from someone else s activity, it would do little to address, and may even perpetuate, economic inequality. Further, if social cooperation seeks to alter the relationship of members of a community to one another, this would be minimal in a cooperative where most members have little interaction with one another; indeed, since most retail consumer co-ops are open to the public, it can be hard to tell who in the store at any given time is a member. 43 Consumer co-ops also can, by instituting a restrictive membership policy, take advantage of non-members by increasing non-member prices in order to ensure a higher net revenue refunded to members. 44 Finally, in large-scale cooperatives the principle of democratic control is quite weak, because the members only function with respect to governance is through periodic votes for members of the board of directors, and evidence suggests that participation levels tend to be quite low. 45 The issue of scale is significant for all cooperatives, for several reasons. The larger the co-op, the less connection its members are likely to feel with it, the more alienated it becomes from them, the less it must rely on member involvement and the more it must rely on professional management. Professionalization of management has problematic tendencies insofar as it leads to a class of officials whose interests, focus, and concerns may be different from those of the membership, and it can loosen members sense of responsibility to the organization. Although the concern is most acute in consumer co-ops, it has proven to be no less a problem in Mondragón. 46 Producer cooperatives should not be left out of consideration, either. After all, in terms of revenue and market share, these are some of the largest. However, when it 41 Webb and Webb, The Consumers Co-operative Movement, pp Lambert, Studies, p To some extent, cooperatives can counteract this by developing a more socially oriented, participatory culture. 44 This is unlikely, however, for two reasons: Increasing membership is usually a better strategy for survival, and exploited non-members could respond by forming their own cooperative or shopping elsewhere. See also note 40, above. 45 See Lambert, Studies, pp George Cheney, Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragón (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

15 Symposium: Engaging Emancipatory Social Science and Social Theory 371 comes to the agricultural cooperatives in particular (or any cooperative made up of independent enterprises), serious problems arise with regard to their ability to adopt the Cooperative Principles. After all, the 1995 Statement of Cooperative Identity specifically defines a cooperative as an association of persons, and the idea that cooperatives put people at the centre of their business and not capital is what the ICA calls the Cooperative Difference. 47 However, many agricultural coops are owned by family farms that are run as independent, for-profit businesses that associate in order to, as Sunkist puts it, gain a mutually larger market share, 48 and demonstrate little regard for a more just and equitable society. This having been said, agricultural cooperatives may be the only thing preserving the family farm and standing in the way of the complete take-over of American agricultural production by giant agribusinesses. In some parts of the world, agricultural and artisan producer cooperatives have been an important means of economic, social, and political empowerment in subaltern communities. 49 Thus, while producer cooperatives, particularly those in the agricultural sector, may not be seen as agents of social transformation as currently constituted, it would be unwise to exclude them entirely from a transformative strategy. With respect to social transformation, then, each of the primary sectors of the cooperative movement has its strengths and weaknesses. From a strategic perspective, the best path would be one that takes advantage of the strengths and addresses the weaknesses of each. A fairly new approach referred to as multistakeholder cooperatives includes membership categories for each stakeholder group principally consumers and workers, but in some cases including suppliers and even financiers. 50 Hoyt describes this type of cooperative as a community institution in which many actors have an economic interest in its success. 51 The model is attractive for the way it ensures that, as Hoyt puts it, The unique interests and goals of each [stakeholder group] are explicitly recognized in the membership requirements and organizational structure. 52 It only works, however, within the specific context of a single cooperative, and, indeed, is most relevant only in retail operations in which consumers play a significant and direct role. But if Wright errs by only considering labor, it is similarly the case that focusing on retail alone means that half of the economic equation is missing. To affect a meaningful social transformation it is necessary to alter the mode of distribution and that of production, of labor and of consumption. 47 ICA, What is a Co-operative?,, 48 Sunkist, Cooperative,, Not all agricultural cooperatives are like this. Examples of more socially oriented agricultural cooperatives include the Cabot dairy cooperative based in Vermont (see, #160#cabotcheese.coop/.), and the CROPP Cooperative (see, our-story/overview/.). 49 Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement. 50 Ann Hoyt, Consumer Ownership in Capitalist Economies: Applications of Theory to Consumer Cooperation, in C.D. Merrett and N. Walzer (eds), Cooperatives and Local Development: Theory and Applications for the 21st Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p Wright includes a brief discussion of something similar to multistakeholder cooperatives called solidarity cooperatives in his discussion of the social economy in Quebec (Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, pp ). 51 Hoyt, Consumer Ownership, p Ibid.

16 372 Thad Williamson et al. In his discussion of the socialist compass, Wright refers to social ownership, noting that the term society here refers to any social unit within which people engage in interdependent economic activity which uses means of production and generates some kind of product. 53 The cooperative market economy, as Wright describes it, consists mostly of worker cooperatives. 54 His is a production-oriented model, but not all enterprises are focused on production. I would suggest, however, that the scope of interdependency be enlarged to incorporate both production and distribution, to include both workers and consumers. If the point is to establish a more democratic system so that people can exert more control over the institutions that establish the conditions for the fulfillment of their needs, one must consider not only their status as workers but also their status as consumers. What is needed is a model that can break down the worker/consumer dichotomy. Wright does not provide this. Conclusion Envisioning Real Utopias gives us a valuable collection of tangible ideas about ways to move towards a more livable world, with cooperatives as an important part of any strategy for fundamental social change. Wright offers us a hint but only a hint of what the cooperative movement has to offer. By limiting his view to just one sector, and presenting it without the benefit of the larger context, Wright ends up downplaying the significance of the movement and the contribution it can make to radical social change. The fact of the matter is that cooperatives already play a significant role in strategies for change and provide an institutional model that embodies the progressive values of equality and democracy that we may hope will be realized in the future. As the world s oldest and largest democratic social movement and the oldest and largest existing alternative to the liberal capitalist model, the cooperative movement offers a tremendous amount of history and diversity that can be of value moving forward. If we are serious about making utopias real, we should, as one writer suggests, consider the cooperative sector as a powerful potential ally for positive change in the world a sleeping giant that needs to be awakened and challenged. 55 This requires that we recognize, and seek to engage, the potential for social transformation that exists in all types of cooperatives. Real Utopias in a Gilded Age: The Case of American Populism J. S. Maloy Oklahoma State University, USA In 1877 some neighbors in Lampasas County, in north-central Texas, organized something they called the Farmers Alliance. They had already been cooperating in 53 Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, p Ibid., Greg MacLeod, The Business of Relationships, in C.D. Merrett and N. Walzer (eds), Cooperatives and Local Development: Theory and Applications for the 21st Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 292.